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Welcome to OOo development for Windows

This is an initial attempt to fill out information for building on Windows.
If it ends up being complete, this notice can be removed! At the moment you'll have to piece together information from other pages with the changes here for doing it on Windows.

Most of this wiki assumes that you'll be using a reasonably current Linux system, as a time saving feature. While real hackers prefer Free software, if you're forced to build stuff for Windows, this is the place to be.

Development Tools

There have been several different ways of building with more or less success...

Other ways to build are documented below, the official way requires Visual C++ .NET 2003

Visual C++ .NET 2003

This is the full version of Visual C++. It is the official way to build OpenOffice.org.
It seems like the Standard version of this (approx $109 price) should be sufficient but I have not confirmed this. (The alternative is the full Visual Studio).

Visual C++ Toolkit 2003

Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 is not currently usable because it doesn't contain all the libraries required for building OpenOffice.org. See Issue 51145 for progress on this issue.

TODO: fill in all the required libraries, and possible alternatives - in the issue.

MinGW

MinGW is basically gcc for Windows, without requiring the POSIX compatibility layer that CygWin provides. You can use the CygWin compiler with the -mno-cygwin switch and it has the same effect.

MinGW is not officially supported at the moment, so it will probably take some work to get it

Work to build OpenOffice.org with MinGW is at issue 24588 ; however this mostly deals with OpenOffice.org 1.1 branch at the moment.

Using vanilla source

While ooo-build has been developed to make building OOo less painful, you might also try to start out with the standard source code. After you download and unpack a vanilla ooo source tarball, running "configure" in the directory "config_office" will gladly complain about missing build-dependencies. The remaining build process is described in the document Building under Windows with tcsh

Using ooo-build

These are addenda to using ooo-build with the following command line:

./configure --with-win32

ooo-build should pick up all the other requirements for you automatically (reading them out of the registry)

Extra requirements

Cygwin requires the cabextract package.

Miscellaneous info

csc.exe comes from the c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322 directory, you might need --with-csc-path.

Using the latest cygwin release (1.5.18) can lead to tcsh freezing in places - the build will appear to hang. you can fix this by using the latest snapshot (e.g. 20050825) or running cat /proc/$nnn/cmdline where $nnn is the number of the process. See issue 51560 for more info...

With cygwin 1.5.18, makecab.exe hangs when run from the build process (but it works fine when run standalone). So you definitely want to use a snapshot and avoid cygwin 1.5.18, unless you enjoy wasting half a week of your life debugging like I did ...